The first time the world finally sees Facebook’s true ambition, to be the single service that dominates identity on the Internet.
Some Quick Stats about Facebook:
- More than 400 million active users
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- Average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
- Average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
- Average user creates 70 pieces of content each month
- More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
- There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
Ad agencies must keep up with the new transformations of Facebook and its impact on social media and the advertising industry.
Robert Scoble, best known for his blog, Scobleizer, reports from Facebook’s F8 developer conference with some enlightening interviews and video of Facebook’s press conference.
Robert’s first interview is with David Kirkpatrick is very enlightening and I wanted to share it with the readers of Fuel Lines. David is one of the foremost authorities of Facebook. He just finished a book, The Facebook Effect, about Facebook. David says, “This is not just another company, it is a transformational phenomenon, it is really great, but it is really scary in some ways too.”
Facebook announces new ways subscribers will be able to personalize their online presence and share what is important to them:
- The Open Graph: A social platform that Facebook is intending to turn into a more intelligent way of searching the internet, offering an individually relevant set of search results based on the user doing the looking. The Open Graph could offer the first serious challenge to Google.
- Social Plug-ins: Facebook is offering a lot of new social plug-ins as a way for other websites to embed widgets on their own pages with direct and often live access to what’s going on in Facebook in relation to the site that you happen to be looking at. Facebook will try and get us to use Facebook Connect, which means all of these other websites will have access to our Facebook profiles and data
- Docs.com: From within Facebook, users will be able to create documents, share them with friends and edit them together as well.
- Graph API: Facebook API which will allow developers to create better applications and more easily as well. Anything you share or Like around the web is going to turn up on your profile and be obvious to all your friends as well as appear in widgets on external sites as well, an extension of the Public portion of your profile.
This flow of social information has profound benefits—from driving better decisions to keeping in touch more easily—and we’re really proud that Facebook is part of the shift toward more social and personalized experiences everywhere online.
This next version of Facebook Platform puts people at the center of the web. It lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social. For example, if you like a band on Pandora, that information can become part of the graph so that later if you visit a concert site, the site can tell you when the band you like is coming to your area. The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken. From Mark Zuckerberg’s (CEO of Facebook) Blog Post
The Bottom Line: All of this is geared towards Facebook being able to make money by advertising with more relevance to its users
A good guide: What you should know about Facebook’s changes
